Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art

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http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t713395157
Inscription and re-framing: at the editing table of Harun
Farocki
Malin Wahlberg

Online Publication Date: 01 February 2004

To cite this Article: Wahlberg, Malin (2004) 'Inscription and re-framing: at the editing
table of Harun Farocki', Konsthistorisk Tidskrift/Journal of Art History, 73:1, 15 - 26
To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/00233600410027273
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00233600410027273
Inscription and Re-framing:
At the Editing Table of Harun Farocki
Malin Wahlberg
Introduction
Video art offers a context where the
plasticity and sensory experience of moving
images may be appreciated anew. Old concepts
of »the cinematic« and film culture are being
re-invented beyond the movie theatre, includ-
ing also digital figuration and representation
in real-time. Attention has been given to ap-
propriations of fiction film, such as Douglas
Gordon’s work on Psycho by Alfred Hitchcock
in 24-Hour Psycho (993).1 However, broader
aspects of media culture are also being subject
to conceptual re-framing.
Photography and video art offer ongoing
projects to conceptualize the social premises of
media culture, structures of control and preser-
vation, as well as our attitude to different kinds
of images. For example, through the re-use,
enlargement, and masking of private family
images, the photographer Maria Miesenberger
seems to inquire into a social practice of self-
preservation: the domestic ritual of family pic-
tures and, notably, what they fail to show.
Aside from videos, which literally address the
photographic image as an object of memory,
such as Art of Memory (Woody Vasulka, 987),2
there are works between video art and docu-
mentary cinema that posit memory and histori-
cal time through the act of filming space. In the
multimedia installation Bordering on Fiction:
Chantal Akerman’s D’est (995), Akerman de-
constructed her film D’est (»From the East,«
993). This experimental documentary consists
© Taylor & Francis 2004. I S S N 0023-3 6 0 9
of slow lateral pans and static long takes of
places and people, filmed in Germany, Poland,
and Russia, which result in a highly poetic and
fragmentary image of the Eastern European
situation after the fall of Communism. Border-
ing on Fiction invited the gallery visitor to walk
through three interrelated rooms, where the
play with duration and the camera gaze in D’est
met with a decomposition of screen-time, time
and space, and memory, respectively.3
A questioning of image and truth, photo-
graphic inscription, and memory are crucial to
these examples. Their media critique appears
through the strategy of re-use, decontextualiza-
tion, and re-framing, which is further empha-
sized in the space of exhibition: radical enlarge-
ment of family pictures, or sequences projected
on multiple screens. Harun Farocki stands out
as a pioneer in this context of inscription and
re-framing. Since 965, he is the filmmaker/
video artist who most radically provides a criti-
cal meditation on media and image-memories,
and in recent years this practice has increas-
ingly migrated into the gallery room.
The following discussion refers to predomi-
nant notions of photographic representation,
and existential concerns with image and
memory. I argue that Farocki offers a critical
reassessment of these issues from the horizon
of contemporary media culture. To specify, this
essay sets out to map the photographic trace as it
is thematically treated in Farocki’s work gener-
ally, although the focus will be on Ich Glaubte
KO N STH I STO R I S K TI D S K R I FT 2004, VO L 73, N O 1
D O I. 10 8 0/00233 6 00410027273
16 MALI N WAH LB E R G
Gefangene Zu Sehen (»I Thought I Was Seeing
Convicts,« 2000).4 In this video the »pastness«
associated with the photographic imprint and
the associated relation between image and
death meets with non-analogue imagery and
the real-time recording of surveillance cam-
eras. »Archive,« »the editing table,« and »mon-
tage« are important themes in Farocki’s critical
approach to media culture. In this play with
representation and visual technology the trace
is demystified, because Farocki pays attention
to the mechanisms of power and selection that
are pivotal within the process of producing and
preserving image-memories.
The Trace of the Past
Two aspects are crucial to classical charac-
terizations of the photograph: the process of
inscription that stresses the autonomy of the
apparatus, and the claimed objectivity of its im-
printed views.5 Also, ever since the considera-
tion of »heliography,« the reflection on photog-
raphy involves phenomenological assumptions
about our affective and existential response to
the photograph as an imprint of the past in the
presence.6 From the viewer’s perspective, a pho-
tographic imprint ascribes immortality to the
referent it transcends. To recall Susan Sontag,
this »neat slice of time« preserves the historical
referent by making the captured instant exceed
its actual duration. Our attitude towards the
photographic image is marked by its eviden-
tial efficacy as a trace of the past. As such, it
not only justifies the truth-claim ascribed to
photographic representation, it also evokes the
photograph as a phantasmagoric, paradoxical,
and imaginary space.7
The photographic ability to embalm a mo-
ment in the past has often been singled out as
»the ontological other« of the moving image
which unfolds in the present, the appropriate
tempus of intense identification.8 However,
moving images may also display the trace-
status of photographic representation, because
the moment of inscription is implied within
the unfolding of views and sounds. Fiction
film and documentary genres alike, they are
cultural representations marked by their date of
recording and, hence, they are potential traces
of the past, which contribute to our intersub-
jective archive of image-memories. This is an
important argument of Bernard Stiegler, who
suggests that film images provide souvenirs of
past events, but they are fabricated as recorded
tertiary memory and are usually unmemorable
on a personal and subjective level.9 In turn,
these virtual memories become reinforced as
visual inscriptions of the past by the realistic
force of photographic representation.
A Phenomenology of the Imprint
Trace and aura. The trace is the appearance of a
nearness, however far removed the thing that left
it behind may be. The aura is the appearance of
a distance, however close the thing that calls it
forth. In the trace, we gain possession of the thing;
in the aura, it takes possession of us.10
In this quote, Walter Benjamin accounts for a
philosophical theme, which reverberates also in
the theory of photography and film: »the trace.«
La trace is a recurrent issue in French phe-
nomenology. Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Mer-
leau-Ponty, Emmanuel Lévinas, Paul Ricœur,
and Roland Barthes, all address the semiotic
hybridity of this notion between materiality
and experience. As a philosophical matter, »the
trace« seems to spring from Martin Heidegger,
who strongly emphasized that time is some-
thing intrinsically shared and if separated
from the dialectic of future, past, and present,
would be nothing but a misleading abstraction.
Instead, transition characterizes every moment
 INSCRIPTION AND RE-FRAMING: AT THE EDITING TABLE OF HARUN FAROCKI 17
as a constant split of »now,« »not-yet-now,«
and »no-longer-now,« because our existence
as human beings is marked by our knowledge
of a coming death: We come, we die, but our
actions and work remain.11 The trace becomes
an intentional object, which mode of being is
equivalent to its function as inscription of the
past within the present. In the work of Paul
Ricœur, and in Time and Narrative specifically,
it becomes an ethical trope in his discussion on
historical time, where the temporal status of the
vestige is linked to our responsibility toward
the »historical other.«12
As I have shown elsewhere, this phenomeno-
logical discourse of the trace reverberates in
interesting ways in the classical theory of pho-
tography and film.13 For example, André Bazin
stressed the temporal transgression between
past and present, and the existential relation
between image and death invoked by the pho-
tograph. However, Bazin’s phenomenological
account of images and temporal transgression
goes beyond a mere belief in reality tran-
scended. Rather, it points to the act of looking
at the image and the intersection of trace-mem-
ory-imagination. We recognize this three-part
scheme from Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, where
the trace of the past cannot be reduced to the
idea of pure transcendence, because it demands
some kind of extra-textual knowledge to be-
come meaningful to the subject: »[T]hese traces
in themselves do not refer to the past: they are
present; and, in so far as I find in them signs of
some ‘previous’ event, it is because I derive my
sense of the past from elsewhere […].«14
This assumption implies a shift of focus from
the ontology of the image as trace, to meanings
and sensations encountered with certain im-
ages. The emphasis on »certain« is important in
this context, because the transgression between
past and present time cannot take place with-
out something with which »[…] to animate that
piece of paper in order to lend it a significance
that it did not have before. [My emphasis].«15
Hence, what matters here is the process of im-
agination or contextualization that turns the
trace into a sign-effect and this is not surpris-
ingly what Roland Barthes suggested by the
notion of animation. In his discussion of the
punctum effect, animation refers to the affec-
tive meaning of the photograph, which here is
disclosed by the context externally ascribed to
the image.16
In relation to film and video art, the notion
of animation could be related to the narrative
contextualization of image-memories, or to
the elaborate deconstruction of memory and
media production. Images are transformed
into image-memories by means of the moving
gaze of a film camera, music, sound effects,
text, or a narrator who interprets what we see,
or suggests what the images fail to show. In this
context of creative deconstruction and re-fram-
ing, taken-for-granted notions of transparency,
photographic realism, and narrative re-inven-
tions of the past are being questioned. Here, the
meaning of the trace cannot be separated from
context, because the de-composition at hand
posits the construction of montage and narra-
tion; the edges of the frame through which the
world is transformed.
The Trace Demystified: At the Editing-
Table of Harun Farocki
»The trace of the trace« is the label I choose for
techniques in film and video to stage traces of
the past through, for example, photographs, ar-
chival footage, recorded speech, text, and verbal
discourses of testimony. In this realm of re-in-
vented memory, the trace is often evoked in col-
lected fragments from different media contexts.
This material aspect of image compilation ques-
18 MALI N WAH LB E R G
Fig. 1. Re-framed TV-screens in communication. Interface‚
Farocki, 1995.
tions the idea of the image-memory as directly
correspondent to historical time. Instead, a se-
quence may perform as a documentary ready-
made, un objet trouvé, which, similar to the
installation art of Marcel Duchamp results in
a thought-provoking re-contextualizing of the
object or image. In turn, such critical approach
to compilation may posit the image-memory as
a media construction in itself.
With its strong focus on the historical and
socio-economic structures of media culture,
the work by Harun Farocki would in this con-
text radically question the trace as a mere phe-
nomenological issue. Rather, the metaphysical
notion of transcendence is undermined by the
technology of memory supplied by film and
media representations. In everyday life, this
technology has a crucial role in the reconstruc-
tion of the past. Consequently, in Farocki’s
work »the archive« symbolizes a reversal be-
tween the trace and historical time – the trace
may be less an imprint of what happened in the
past, than a constituting sign in the narrative
re-invention of history.
The major trope for this re-framing of the
trace is the editing table: »the workstation for
the reworking of images and sound; the con-
trol desk; the player, the recorder.«17 This is
perhaps most evident in the video Schnittstelle
(»Interface,« 995), where »Schnittstelle« indi-
cates both the point of intersection between
two images and the interval between the time
of inscription and the moment of recollection
and contemplation. The editing table ultimately
appears as the metaphoric control desk of the
editor/filmmaker/storyteller/historian.
Interface is characterized by the vertical
montage of video editing, of the frame splitting
and partly overlapping in two spatio-temporal
spheres. One offers a compiled sequence, and
the other shows Farocki at the editing table,
where he reflects and visually recollects and
reframes sequences from his work. The aes-
thetics of Interface is literally grounded in the
idea of two frames in continuous communica-
tion, conflict, or in an ambiguous sound-im-
age concert. Sequences are being plucked out
of context, recomposed and contrasted, their
meaning constantly being disclosed by opposed
discourses. Interface mirrors the display of
the apparatus as well as the mediating process
itself. It also offers a personal reflection on the
intellectual and tactile relation between the
maker and making of film, between man and
machine, while explicitly framing the practice
of film- versus video editing.
A number of sequences from Farocki’s previ-
ous work are quoted here, reframed, and con-
trasted with each other, as motifs are chosen to
interlink the associations evoked by »Schnitts-
telle.« For example, the metaphor between
filmmaking and the encoding and decoding of
messages materializes in an image of the Ger-
man encoding machine »Enigma.« On another
occasion, the filmmaker’s workstation is com-
pared to an artificial pool, which simulates the
production of waves, the movements of which
may be associated with the function of image
 INSCRIPTION AND RE-FRAMING: AT THE EDITING TABLE OF HARUN FAROCKI 19
reproduction in his own work. In voice-over
Farocki thus contemplates the symbolic impli-
cation of the artificial pool: »The sea unfurl-
ing on the shore, irregular but not haphazard,
binds one’s view with its movement, without
capturing it, thus setting thoughts free.«
The example of Interface offers an interesting
response to the enclosed discussion of image
ontology in classical discourses on image and
temporality. The significant use of sound and
the inevitable social context of the film archive
forces us to remember that »the trace of the
past« has less to do with essence, than with a
complex production of historical time, where
narration and the re-framing of media events
rules out any preconception of the photograph
as a window on the past.
In Farocki’s work the cultural signification of
intertextuality becomes highlighted through a
strategy of cutting and pasting, of keying and
contrasting, which in turn results in new in-
tertexts. Hence, Wie man sieht (»AsYou See,«
6mm film, 986), Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik
(»Workers Leaving the Factory,« video, 995),
Interface, or I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts,
are less about the imprint as a trace of the
past, than about images as signs, coded by the
socio-historical realm of media culture. In his
analysis of Workers Leaving the Factory, Trond
Lundemo compares Farocki’s screen practice
to the cataloguing of an archive: Different
from the totalizing project of an encyclopedia
and the museum’s static organization in space,
»Workers Leaving the Factory is more similar to
an archival project, where the constant re-or-
ganization and repetition of the isolated items
and files are made in accordance with the crite-
ria of the search.«18
Consequently, recollection in this context is
perhaps less connected to a mnemonic proc-
ess, than to the material activity of inverting
and recombining sequences, of making images
comment on themselves, which – in line with
Bernard Stiegler’s suggestion – posits the terti-
ary memory of the media archive.
Ich Glaubte Gefangene Zu Sehen (2000)
Farocki’s work of film and video exemplify the
social and intersubjective mechanisms that
cling to any contextualization of photographs
and sequences as image-memories. However,
the aesthetic and phenomenological implica-
tions of »the trace,« and the modalities of
temporality that such an event may evoke in
film experience, seem to go beyond the archival
context of stored, restored, used, and recycled
images. Apart from any potential signification
that the photographic trace might provoke in
fiction film, we may also consider contempo-
rary media contexts that challenge fantasies
about the photographic imprint and the image
as a trace of the past. This challenge consists of
screen cultures that might effectuate a »trace
status,« but which perform beyond the param-
eters of photographic inscription or electronic
recording, or belong to a documentary practice
outside the archive and culture of preservation.
The screen cultures that I have in mind are that
of computer simulation and video surveillance.
In his essay, »Subjunctive Documentary:
Computer Imaging and Simulation,« Mark J. P.
Wolf raises some crucial questions that digital
culture in general, and computer simulation
in particular, offer to the debate about docu-
mentary representation.19 In comparison with
photographic representation, Wolf argues that
computer-imaging technologies have changed
the relation between observation and docu-
mentation. On a technical/material level, com-
puter-imaging »is often indexically less direct
than film-based photography, due to the active
mediation of hardware and software, as well as
20 MALI N WAH LB E R G
the storage of the image as a signal instead of a
fixed record.«20 From an aesthetic point of view,
the monitoring of, for example, a graphic com-
puter simulation appears as a simplified model
of space, albeit as a three-dimensional time-
space which, despite its lack of photographic
realism, is related to the two-dimensional ar-
chitecture of film images.
Moreover, ‘documentation’ and ‘observation’
seem suddenly dislocated from ‘index,’ in the
sense of a photographic trace of the real. By
suggesting the term of conceptual indices, Wolf
indicates a shift ‘from the perceptual to the
conceptual,’ while also emphasizing the close
bond in computer simulation between recon-
struction, visualization and interpretation:
[C]omputer simulations are often made from
data taken from the outside world, but not al-
ways. Just as the digital image does not always
have a real-world referent, computer simulation
can be used to image real or imaginary cons-
tructs, or some combination of the two. […] As
a simulation is constructed, and the data set
becomes larger and more comprehensive, its in-
dexical link to the physical world grows stronger,
until the simulation is thought to be sufficiently
representative of some portion or aspect of the
physical world.21
Hence, as a context of digital culture, com-
puter simulation offers an illustration of how
contemporary media technology may question
the classical discourse of the trace. Alterna-
tively, the surveillance video may similarly
force us to complicate the above outlined rela-
tion between »archive« and »media-memory.«
In media studies, the surveillance camera is
continuously related to the signification that
Foucault ascribed to Jeremy Bentham’s prison
system, called »the Panopticon.«22 As such, it
has already become a critical trope of social
control, and the increased use of surveillance
footage as legal evidence continuously confirms
the truth-claim and objectivity associated with
this disembodied device of observation.23
For now, I would like to develop these two
media contexts of observation and documenta-
tion with reference to I Thought I Was Seeing
Convicts, where Farocki uses both computer
simulation and surveillance tape to reframe the
problem of the trace vis-à-vis intertextuality,
and archival practices of image preservation.
Indeed, what is more illustrative for an account
of social control mechanisms versus visual
technologies, than the example of a modern
prison? Farocki offers a video essay in the herit-
age of Foucault. The range of prison technol-
ogy – a mix of surveillance camera, electronic
body search, simulation and electronic ankle
bracelets – echoes the latter’s discussion on
both literal and metaphoric levels. Images show
the ground plan of an American prison, which
Farocki characterizes as »a control booth like in
a factory,« where the staff observes activities in
the whole building using monitors connected
to the video surveillance system.
The model of the workplace, which was in-
troduced in Interface, extends into this video,
where the frame is similarly divided into two
rectangles that sometimes show a double view,
and sometimes the interval between inserted
sequences. In addition, I Thought I Was Seeing
Convicts deepens the conceptual charting of
overlapping media contexts, to posit the com-
puter screen and the surveillance camera. This
is a video compilation, where images of compu-
ter graphics meet with surveillance footage of
an American prison, and sequences from silent
movies that feature prison life. The feature of
the split-screen is here emphasized by the punc-
tuation of a black screen, which simultaneously
offers textual clarifications of what we see.
However, different from the intertitles in silent
 INSCRIPTION AND RE-FRAMING: AT THE EDITING TABLE OF HARUN FAROCKI 21
cinema, the commentary often appears in dou-
ble on both screens. This device also functions
as a black screen, a denial of vision, which offers
a vertical spacing of the screens, rather than a
visualized cut between two sequences. Hence,
the text appears as marginal notes in the black
field outside the compiled footage. On some oc-
casions, we also see how the black screen is used
to slice the »real-life« footage of a surveillance
camera into significant traces of the past.
With reference to the account of media and
image-memory, I now take a closer look at two
examples from I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts,
which seem to develop and modify the classical
theme of the photographic trace.
Documentation, Observation, and
Simulation of Real-Time
The introductory doubled view of I Thought I
Was Seeing Convicts offers silently and without
commentary two computer screens that display
a graphic outline of sixteen bars, symmetri-
cally arranged in parallel rows of eight. Dots
are moving irregularly along these mysterious
bars, the number and movement of which dif-
fers between the left and the right frame. The
image on the right is then replaced by the fol-
lowing text on a black background: »These dots
represent customers moving through the aisles
of a supermarket.« Then, a modified recon-
struction appears, as the black frame switches
to the opposite side, »The objective is to deter-
mine which route the customers take and how
it can be extended.«
Let us return for a moment to Wolf’s discus-
sion of »conceptual indices.« In this case, the
link to the real is suggested by a reconstruction
based on statistics about customer behavior,
»The longer the route, the more likely it is
that the customer will make a spontaneous
purchase.« Hence, in terms of documentation,
this is firstly a reconstruction which graphi-
cally mimics both real and ideal movement in
space, the customers reduced to dots moving
realistically, as well as idealistically through the
model of an existing space. As observation, on
the other hand, the simulation visualizes the
probability of a customer’s »walk-through«
in a sufficiently precise way, such as an actual
re-modeling of the architecture would further
stimulate the customer’s purchase.
Apart from visualizing »what could be,
would be, or might have been,«24 the graphic
simulation reproduced in Farocki’s film also
represents the feature of »becoming documen-
tary,« because in order to get information of the
mapped customers and their purchased items,
you are invited to click on the moving dot. This
is even more striking when Farocki juxtaposes
the simulation of the shopping space to that of a
prison: The left frame offers a light blue field de-
marcated by darker blue lines into sections with
moving green dots, the text in the right corner
indicating that »These dots represent prison in-
mates who have been outfitted with electronic
ankle bracelets. […] Click on any inmate and
learn his or her identity;« a list of names appear
in the right frame. Different from the customer
simulation, the representation of inmates in the
prison yard offers a real-time display; informa-
tion is directly transmitted from the electronic
ankle bracelet to the graphic display of the
computer, so that a more complex set of data
increases the link between the representation
and the physical world.
Farocki decontextualizes the imagery of
computer simulation and compares the recon-
struction of a food store with that of a prison.
As a result, the control of the customer’s move-
ment along the shelves mirrors the inmate’s
controlled movement inside the prison. Real-
ized through a video compilation of computer
22 MALI N WAH LB E R G
Fig. 2. ‘These dots represent prison inmates who have been
outfitted with electronic ankle bracelets.’ I Thought I Was
Seeing Convicts, Farocki, 2000.
imagery, the discursive impact of this critical
preface is also symbolically completed in
the related function between the computer
simulation at hand and that of the surveillance
camera, which is the dominant motif in the
remainder of the film. The spatial logic of the
food store, where prolonged aisles equal addi-
tional purchase, inverts the prison yard where
restricted space equals restrained action, but
their architectures coincide in computer simu-
lation where it mirrors the disciplinary and
controlling principle of Panopticon.
When Surveillance of Life Turns into
Inscription of Death
Through its merely functional reason for being,
the imagery of a surveillance camera offers a
non-aesthetic example to this discussion. With
its flickering, unfocused, fragmentary sound,
and a poor, bluish color representation, the tape
of a surveillance video stands out as an auto-
matic recording, a mechanic observer of real-
life. The blurred images stand for recording in
real-time, a direct mediation of what actually
occurs within the limited view of the camera-
Fig. 3. Real-time appearance of ‘the trace:’ X-ray during
a body search at Corcoran State Prison. I Thought I Was
Seeing Convicts, Farocki, 2000.
eye, and this is of course the legitimizing factor
of its »objective« representation. I Thought I
Was Seeing Convicts critically posits the mate-
rial feel of surveillance tape, as well as the func-
tions and effects of the surveillance camera as a
symbol of regulation and control.
One part of the video shows images and
sounds registered by the prison surveillance
system. Farocki notes that »surveillance cam-
eras show the norm and anticipate deviations
from it.« In the following frame, the bluish vid-
eotape is contrasted with the black and white
sequence of an old prison movie set, where a
girl greets her lover through the bars. The pris-
oner manages to bribe the guard so he can step
outside to embrace her. Another split-screen
offers a surveillance overview and a closer view
of a long table where inmates receive their visi-
tors. The left frame zooms into a couple holding
hands, and is then replaced by a black frame
which reads, »Visitors in prison; surveillance
from the ceiling.«
Then, a close-up of the same couple’s hands
appears on both frames, and we hear frag-
ments of speech and sound from the staff at
 INSCRIPTION AND RE-FRAMING: AT THE EDITING TABLE OF HARUN FAROCKI 23
the control board; the screen turns black, and
the double-spaced text reads, »A visitor opens a
transparent purse.« The action is shown in the
next few frames, which is then replaced by a
new text, »and extracts two coins, an old quar-
ter and the new one« – »The new coin speaks of
life beyond the prison walls.« A close-up of the
two coins is juxtaposed to a pan shot of the sur-
roundings outside the prison gates.
At this point, the compilation accomplishes
a symbolic staging of surveillance technology,
where it turns into a trope of controlled real-
time. In the re-framed episode with the trans-
parent purse, the excessive and continuous con-
trol of the inmate’s gestures offers the ultimate
contrast to everyday life in freedom. Yet, a trace
of historical time – the new coin – slides into
the regulated present tense of prison life.
Apart from the technology of power repre-
sented by the surveillance camera, Farocki also
conceptualizes a mode of representation and
visual culture the temporal status of which is
that of real-time, but which nevertheless may
provide evidence of what actually happened.
For the present consideration of »the trace,«
I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts draws atten-
tion to the acclaimed truth-status of automatic
video recording, as well as the thrill of »the
real« associated with the images of a surveil-
lance camera. This is an image context where
preservation is granted only the record of ex-
traordinary events, such as, armed robbery or
death. In this respect, Farocki’s video refers to
media phenomena such as »reality-TV,« or the
increasing use of surveillance footage as legal
evidence in trials.
An important part of the film recycles sur-
veillance footage from Corcoran State Prison
in California. It is a »high-security prison«
with an advanced system of armed guards
and cameras that are supposed to guarantee
the safety of both inmates and staff. However,
since its construction, guards have opened fire
2000 times, hundreds of inmates have been
wounded, twelve of them seriously, and five
were killed. Farocki reuses material provided
by a Californian activist project »Prison Fo-
cus«25 to critically stress the mechanized bru-
tality of prison surveillance and punishment
– »Behind the window, armed guards; above
them, the camera. Field of vision and field of
fire coincide.« What I find most interesting in
this context is the representation of »the Shoot-
ing Review Board,« which is the workstation at
Corcoran State Prison, where each provocation
of firearm is recorded and preserved. Among
the fragments of surveillance footage, the com-
pilation in I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts also
reframes the death of a convict, fatally shot on
April 7, 989.
An image of a prison yard is shown in the up-
per left-hand corner, under which is indicated,
»Pictures from surveillance cameras.« The next
frame, showing two prisoners in the same yard,
appears in the right-hand corner. Another text
indicates, »They are only worthy of attention in
exceptional cases.« With the ensuing sequence
taken by another camera, Farocki emphasizes
that »Only in exceptional cases are the tapes
not erased and reused.« The following series of
images shows an illustrative example, begin-
ning with the same framing of a prison yard
and Farocki’s marginal note, »An exceptional
case: death.«
The same slow-motion sequence of blurred
black and white footage unfolds on both
frames: a man moves toward the left corner of
the frame, kicking somebody off screen. A text
enters from the left, to explain what we see, »A
fight in the yard at Corcoran State Prison in
California.« One can barely discern what is
happening, as the violent action partly disap-
24 MALI N WAH LB E R G
Fig. 4. Surveillance video, inscription in real-time: A fight
at Corcoran State Prison. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts,
Farocki, 2000.
pears off frame, beyond the left corner of the
image, but there is soon another marginal note
in the upper left to explain that »Bystanders
run for cover.« For a second, the fighting men
move into view of the camera, which is dou-
bled on Farocki’s split-screen. Then, another
black frame covers the left with the inscription,
»White gun smoke moves across the image: A
guard has opened fire.« The smoke dissolves in
the slow-motion reproduction of the video, and
then another intertitle explains that »William
Martinez is hit.« The following sequence shows
one of the men stumble and fall, »William Mar-
tinez, aged 30, convicted of armed robbery, lies
there for nine more minutes.« At this point, the
silence is broken by a voice-over, explaining
that, due to security restrictions, it takes staff
nine minutes and fourteen seconds to move
over the yard to take care of Martinez, »a proc-
ess we have condensed with this video.«
Although the procedure of extracting Mar-
tinez’ body from the yard has been compressed
to a little more than one minute, the doubled se-
quence in Farocki’s video accomplishes another
of those contemplative moments that may be
produced in moving images by the abstract du-
ration of moderated speed, and the time-space
measurement of editing. Two things are espe-
cially poignant in this passage of the film. First,
the insufficient record of the surveillance tape,
and, second, the principle according to which
it has been preserved: the deviance and fatal
outcome of the inscribed event. Ever since the
Rodney King case in 99, the visual evidence
of amateur footage and surveillance devices is
continuously subject to televised narratives and
legal processes. I Thought I Was Seeing Convicts
stresses a crucial aspect of the trace status that
these »real-life« documentations occasionally
achieve in the mainstream culture of spectacu-
lar media events, and fragmented narratives
of repetition. The truth-claim of such optics
of surveillance is always propelled by the raw,
seemingly non-manipulated footage of auto-
matic inscription. Yet, the usual poor quality of
vision and sound makes the signification of the
shown even more dependent on extra-textual
knowledge.
In Farocki’s video, this insufficient mimesis
or pragmatic meaning of camera inscription is
stressed through the prioritized space of writ-
ten commentary, such as, »White gun smoke
moves across the image: A guard has opened
fire.« Context is needed in order to understand
what the image represents, and, yet, there is no
doubt that one of the men is hit and falls to the
ground. Writing about related issues of indexi-
cality in another context of media technology,
Wolf gives another turn to this idea of the lim-
its of representation:
In one sense, a blurred image is an indication
that the technology has reached its limits; sharp
images with dubious indexical linkages may be
more harmful in that their shortcomings are less
noticeable. The instrument does not indicate what
it does not see, and so one must take this into ac-
 INSCRIPTION AND RE-FRAMING: AT THE EDITING TABLE OF HARUN FAROCKI 25
count when studying objects viewed with it.26
Accordingly, the reframing of a fatal shoot-
ing in this film turns into »the death of Mar-
tinez« through the correspondence between the
recorded footage and the knowledge of an in-
cident in the history of Concoran State Prison.
So far, in respect of the cultural signification of
the photographic trace, the surveillance tape
does not differ from other visual media. How-
ever, the function and use of camcorders offer
a context where preservation is only the destiny
of »exceptional recordings.« Videos showing
the disciplined time-space of everyday routine,
of »normality« await nothing but erasure and
reuse.27
And so, paradoxically, we find ourselves
back at Bazin’s formula; image representation
of an irrevocable moment, which in the realm
of moving images may be repeated again and
again, to revitalize the ghostlike gesture of a
body collapsing in the past.
Video Art and Media Critique
In conclusion, I would argue that this and other
videos by Harun Farocki add to, as well as ques-
tion, the phenomenological discourse of the
trace from a wider socio-cultural perspective.
That is, images are being plucked out of context
and re-framed with socio-political reference to
our common attitude toward the truth-claim
of photographic representation. The legitimacy
of images as visible evidence, which to a large
extent is something taken-for-granted in the of-
ficial image-archive of television and documen-
tary film, is here subject to a critical reflection
on image, memory, and the discursive power
of montage. In Farocki’s work, the significant
»Schnittstelle« metaphorically linked work at
the editing table to the construction of histori-
cal narratives. Moreover, the thematic framing
of the man-machine relationship visualizes
social discourses of power and control that lure
behind the production and re-production of
moving images. Through the conceptualized
interface and the motifs of computer simula-
tion and the surveillance camera, the trace
is demystified, while expanding beyond the
notion of inscription and visible evidence, to-
wards the complex realm of media culture.
Endnotes
. Deconstructions of the cinematic and film experience
by Gordon and other video artists are thoroughly dis-
cussed in Annika Wik, Förebild film. Panoreringar over
den samtida konstscenen, Stockholm: Aura Förlag, 200.
2. Marita Sturken discusses Art of Memory and its elabo-
rate video transformation of newsreel, documentary
footage and photographs in »The Politics of Video
Memory. Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions,« in
Michael Renov, and Erika Suderburg, eds., Resolutions.
Contemporary Video Practices, Minneapolis and Lon-
don: Minnesota University Press, 996, p. 4. See also
Raymond Bellour, »Images of the World« in the same
edition.
3. »These exhibitions resulted from the collaboration
between the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis (Kathy
Halbreich and Bruce Jenkins) and the Galerie Nationale
du Jeu du Paume in Paris. […] The museum installation
consisted of three integrated ‘movements’ correspond-
ing to the three galleries in which the exhibit [was]
contained. Upon entering the first gallery, visitors [were]
confronted with a darkened room where the finished
version of From the East [ran] continuously. A second
room [held] 24 video monitors arranged into eight
triptychs, all simultaneously playing different looping
fragments of the film. The third gallery [contained] a
single video monitor and a pair of small speakers placed
on the floor, through which one [could hear] Akerman’s
voice, reciting passages from the Hebrew Bible, as well
as selections from the journal she kept while working on
the film.« Kristine Butler, ‘Bordering on Fiction: Chantal
Akerman’s From the East,’ in Gwendolyn Audrey Foster,
ed., Identity and Memory. The Films of Chantal Akerman,
Wiltshire: Flicks Books, p. 64.
4. Ich Glaubte Gefangene Zu Sehen was shown as a video
installation at Kunst-Werke in Berlin 2000 (L’état des
choses ) and at Hamburger Kunsthalle, projected on two
screens, ‘Innenräume der Kontrolle’ in Berlin, April 2002.
It is also available on VHS.
5. In Le temps d’un regard, François Jost draws attention
to the opposed practices in the 90s, represented by,
on one hand, photography in medicine, ethnography,
geography, criminology and astronomy, and on the
other hand, the popular attraction of »transcendental
photography.« However, the objective status of the
26 MALI N WAH LB E R G
photograph is as strong a motivation for a photographic
identification of a criminal, as for the spiritual represen-
tation of a »ghost.« François Jost, Le temps d’un regard.
Du spectateur aux images, Québec: Nuit Blanche Éditeur,
and Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck, 998.
6. Before 839, there was a metaphysical belief in photog-
raphy as a »natural« phenomenon of light inscription.
François Brunet, La naissance de l’idée de photographie,
Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2000, p. 3.
7. Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York and London:
Penguin Books, 977, 6-7.
8. This is a common issue in classical film theory, where
the debate oscillates between the technological param-
eter of the apparatus and the cognitive parameter of
spectator psychology. The latter position is represented
by Christian Metz, Film Language. A Semiotics of the
Cinema, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 974.
For a representative notion of the »pastness« of the pho-
tograph, see Roland Barthes, La chambre claire, Paris:
Éditions de l’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil, 980; Philippe
Dubois, L’acte photographique, Bruxelles: Fernand Nath-
an-Labor, 983; Jean-Marie Schaeffer, L’image précaire.
Du dispositif photographique, Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
987; Sontag, 977.
9. Bernard Stiegler, La technique et le temps 2. La Désorien-
tation, Paris: Éditions Galilée, 996, p. 4.
0. Walter Benjamin, »The Flâneur,« in The Arcades Project,
translation: Eiland, Howard and McLaughlin, Kevin.
Cambridge and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, 2002, 447: M6a, p. 4.
. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translation: Joan
Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New York, 996,
p. 26.
2. Paul Ricœur, Temps et récit III, Paris: Éditions du Seuil,
985, pp. 26-27.
3. Malin Wahlberg, Figures of Time. On the Phenomenology
of Cinema and Temporality, Doctoral Dissertation at the
Department of Cinema Studies, Stockholm University,
2003.
4. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Percep-
tion, translation: Colin Smith. London and Henley:
Routledge, 962, 43. »[T]hese traces in themselves do
not refer to the past: they are present; and, in so far as I
find in them signs of some ‘previous’ event, it is because
I derive my sense of the past from elsewhere[…].« See
also Jean-Paul Sartre, L’imaginaire, Editions Gallimard,
Paris, 986, p. 44.
5. Sartre, 986, p. 44. »[I]l est nécessaire qu’un certain con-
cours de ma part vienne animer ce bout de carton, lui
prêter le sens qu’il n’avait pas encore.«
6. Barthes, 980, p. 39.
7. Quote from Schnittstelle, »Interface,« Harun Farocki,
995.
8. Trond Lundemo, »Fabrikken og filmarkivets indeks;
Montasje i Arbeiter verlassen die Fabrik,« in Knut Ove
Eliassen, and Thomas Brandt, eds, Maskinkultur. Utsnitt
fra fabrikkens tidsalder. Nr. 3 I Skriftserie fra forskning-
sprosjektet »Fabrikken,« Trondheim: NTNU Norges
teknisk-naturvitenskaplige universitet, 200), pp. 3-32.
9. Mark J.P. Wolf, »Subjunctive Documentary: Computer
Imaging and Simulation,« in Jane M.Gaines and Michael
Renov, eds., Collecting Visible Evidence, Minneapolis,
London: University of Minnesota Press, 999.
20. Wolf, 999, p. 276.
2. Wolf, 999, pp. 280-28.
22. Michael Foucault, Surveiller et punir, Paris: Édition Gal-
limard, 975, pp. 233-243.
23. A reservation may be made to the common re-use of
this Foucault-inspired metaphor in cultural studies,
because today the social and political implications of
surveillance exceed the notion of vision. Consider, for
example, computer programs of control and regulation
that may block illegal activities of copying, or the fact
that somebody else may track down my executed route
on the internet.
24. Wolf 999, p. 28.
25. Prison Focus is an activist group that fights against the
death penalty in general and, more specifically, against
the unsatisfactory state of things at Corcoran State
Prison in California. For more information about their
work and present projects, visit www.prisons.org.
26. Wolf, 999, p. 275.
27. The web-cam culture offers a radical counter-example
to this. Here we find a reversed relation between video
recording and preservation, because it is all about a non-
stop screening of real-time, and the registered events
are mainly non-significant, banal everyday activities, or
an empty room. Also, in contrast to the technology of
power displayed by the surveillance system of a prison,
this tracing of the real may practically be produced and
viewed by anyone equipped with a camcorder and a
website.
Malin Wahlberg
Department of Cinema Studies
Stockholm University
Box 27062
SE-02 5 Stockholm
E-mail: malin.wahlberg@mail.film.su.se